Fighting for Digital Rights in Europe: Our Next Year

It's been almost a year since EFF opened an office in Brussels and focused our attention on political lobbying in the heart of the European Union. In that time, we've learned a great deal about how policies become EC law and how decisions get made in the EU.

We certainly hit the ground running: together with the support of over 10,000 Europeans and other groups, we immediately found ourselves explaining in the European Parliament and Council the collateral damage to consumers, libraries, and the technology sector that would have been caused by criminalizing all IP infringement via IPRED2. We shined a bright light on the (so far unsuccessful) entertainment industry efforts to force through a copyright term extension on sound recordings by slipping it into a committee report. And we articulated the detrimental consequences for European citizens’ privacy, creativity and freedom of expression of mandating ISPs to filter Internet communications, as proposed by the major music and film industries’ lobbyists.

But after a year in Europe concentrating on direct lobbying of MEPs in Brussels, we’ve realized that it's not enough to catch bad policy as it enters the final stages of becoming European Community law. Protecting digital rights requires both well-informed policy-makers and informed and empowered citizens. Defending privacy, and preserving space for the full possibilities of innovation, requires policy debates in a wide range of public spaces.

So this year we’ll be moving away from a focus on Brussels lawmaking and broadening the focus of our European work. We'll concentrate on what EFF does best: grassroots advocacy and activism with our European members, working with like-minded groups on policy campaigns and submissions on common agendas, and offering activism assistance and tech policy analysis and resources for the consumers, artists and innovators who regularly contact us asking for help or advice.

With this shift of emphasis come some personnel changes. Erik Josefsson, EFF European Affairs Coordinator in our Brussels office, will be leaving us at the end of April, and we'll be closing our office in Brussels. Joining our international team is Eddan Katz, formerly the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project, whose tremendous work has provided unprecedented insights into the impact of intellectual property policy in developing countries and advanced the global Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement.

If you'd like to know more about our 2008 plans - or give us suggestions as to how EFF's international team can work best in Europe and around the world - Eddan and Erik will be available at FOSDEM in Brussels, where they will talk about EFF's active campaigns in Europe and discuss upcoming policy issues. EFF invites you to join us for a pre-conference party early on Friday February 22nd at our Brussels Office for food, drinks and good company. Please RSVP to fosdem2008@eff.org.

EFF remains committed to our international program and looks forward to continuing our important work with NGOs on the ground in Europe and elsewhere.

Related Updates

Last week EFF attended the Global Conference on Cyberspace (GCCS) in New Delhi, India, as one of a small handful of nonprofit organizations invited to participate. This was the fifth in a series of conferences sometimes called the London Process, after the first event that was held in London...

Last week the European Parliament passed a new Consumer Protection Regulation [PDF] that allows national consumer authorities to order ISPs, web hosts and domain registries to block or delete websites... all without a court order. The websites targeted are those that allegedly infringe European consumer law. But European consumer...

The global movement for open access to publicly-funded research stems from the sensible proposition that if the government has used taxpayers' money to fund research, the publication of the results of that research should be freely-licensed. Exactly the same rationale underpins the argument that software code that the government...

At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal...

At EFF, we've become all too accustomed to bad news on copyright coming out of Europe, so it's refreshing to hear that Portugal has recently passed a law on copyright that helps to strike a fairer balance between users and copyright holders on DRM. The law doesn't abolish legal...

Increased smartphone usage and availability of wireless broadband has propelled the use of Internet based platforms and services that often compete with similar services based on older technologies. For example services like Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp that offer voice or video calls over the Internet compete with traditional SMS and...

The National Symbols Officer of Australia recently wrote to Juice Media, producers of Rap News and Honest Government Adverts, suggesting that its “use” of Australia’s coat of arms violated various Australian laws. This threat came despite the fact that Juice Media’s videos are clearly satire and no reasonable...

Today EFF and 56 other civil society organizations have sent an open letter [PDF] to European lawmakers outlining our grave concerns with Article 13 of the proposed new Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which would impose a new responsibility on Internet platforms to filter content that...

Today, the the Trump Administration announced the decertification of the Iranian nuclear deal agreed by the previous administration. It's the strongest sign of many showing that the U.S. government intends to take a new and more confrontational line against Iran. But long before the decertification, tech companies were making...